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The real-life story of Deep Throat film star Linda Lovelace saw her morph from prude to sexual revolutionary to late-night punch line to anti-porn crusader and mother.

That’s a lot of changes to cover in the scant 93 minutes allotted to the biopic Lovelace, and co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman never quite pull it off — although you can see how they might have.

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A well-cast Amanda Seyfried plays Lovelace throughout, beginning with her 1970 introduction as sexually naive 21-year-old Linda Boreman, living with her parents (Robert Patrick and Sharon Stone) in suburban Davie, Fla. Linda isn’t much interested in boyfriends or sex (she exclaims, “That’s disgusting!” when a girlfriend mentions oral sex), but that doubtless has to do with a troubled past that includes a teen pregnancy and a child given up for adoption.

A chance meeting with charismatic hustler Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard, hirsute and sleazy) changes her attitude and circumstances rapidly. He takes her under his wing and on the road, first to New York, where she meets Traynor’s porn film associates, director Gerard Damiano (Hank Azaria) and producer Butchie Peraino (Bobby Cannavale), who project both mirth and menace. Later she’ll meet money guy Anthony Romano (Chris Noth), who is all menace.

Gerry and Butchie don’t immediately picture curly-locked cutie Linda as a potential porn star. Chuck persists, and before long, this “sexy Raggedy Ann” (Gerry’s words) has become famous worldwide as Linda Lovelace, star of Deep Throat, a 61-minute comedy about a woman who discovers that her clitoris is in her throat, much to the delight of the men she intimately services.

Released in 1972, Deep Throat is unusual not only for having a plot (never previously much of a concern for porn) but also for the way it breaks through to mainstream audiences to become a pop culture touchstone.

Linda Lovelace is now a household name, an avatar for the era’s sexual revolution, and as archival footage shows, she’s a ready spur for quips and eyebrow raisings from the likes of Johnny Carson, Bob Hope and Walter Cronkite, much to the chagrin of her conservative parents.

Lovelace is more documentary than drama at this point, with bad ’70s hairstyles and such on-the-nose sonic cues as the trippy tune “Spirit in the Sky” checking off the appropriate boxes for atmosphere.

Around the one-hour mark comes much darker material, only hinted at earlier, in which Traynor is revealed as a brutal Svengali who beats Linda, forces her to participate in gang rapes and ruthlessly plans to exploit her fame with endless Deep Throat sequels and vile merchandising (including a blow-up sex doll).

What’s missing is any real sense of where Lovelace’s mind is at, although she hints at an overeagerness to please: “I don’t want to disappoint anyone.”

Later she’ll become an anti-porn crusader and married mom of two, whose autobiography, Ordeal, will graphically detail the extent of her victimhood. Her losses were also financial: Deep Throat grossed $600 million (U.S.), but Lovelace was paid just $1,250 for her starring role. (She died in 2002 in a car crash.)

Fascinating in-jokes suggest there were livelier minds at work off-screen. It can’t be coincidence that the Lovelace cast includes two actors who had their own sordid screen sexploits: Stone’s notorious money shot in Basic Instinct and Chloë Sevigny’s infamous oral sex scene in The Brown Bunny.

On the male side of the ledger, Noth played Mr. Big on Sex and the City; James Franco (who plays a creepy Hugh Hefner here) has lately been exploring Cruising and other adult fascinations; and Eric Roberts was a Chuck Traynor-style sexual exploiter in the Playboy bunny tragedy Star 80.

Ironically, the two Lovelace co-directors, who defied cinematic conventions with their free-form beat generation film Howl, now seem constrained by their own medium.

Unable or unwilling to risk the R rating (or stronger) that a film like Lovelace demands, they’re forced to imply more than they show. The result is a film that is vanilla enough that it could be played on a commercial aircraft, something that couldn’t be said of Deep Throat, even today.

And we’re left pondering the question that is pointedly asked in the film: who is Linda Lovelace?

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